Containers and the RDF Model (A3) from Dan Brickley on 2001-05-18 (w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org from May 2001) (original) (raw)
Regarding http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2001May/0084.html RDFCore WG 2001-05-18 Teleconference Agenda action review A3:
A3: Ora Lassilla/ send analysis (#rdf-container-syntax-ambiguity and
Dan Brickley #rdf-containers-syntax-vs-schema)to rdfcore-wg listI wrote up some brief notes on my Hong Kong discussion w/ Ora last week, sent them to Ora and the www-archive list archiver rather than this list. I wouldn't call this a full analysis of the problem w/ the container model, but the note is at:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2001May/0000.html
Excerpted conclusion:
[[ Two problems are posed by this formulation:
it suggests that any RDF model which describes some container is in possession of a complete description of that container. The phrase "the elements of Ord must be used in sequence starting with RDF:_1" appears to rule out the use of the formal RDF container model for descriptions where only partial information is available. Use case: an rdf:Seq representing the (incompletely represented) houses in a street.
it interacts with the syntactic sugar provided by the rdf:li XML syntax machinery: RDF parsers typically assume that containers encoded using this construct contain complete descriptions of some Bag, Seq or Alt. But there is no syntax-level support for making this clear.
This situation is in tension with a broad design goal of RDF: to allow Web services to aggregate and process partial descriptions. ]]
We (Ora and I) do not yet make any suggestions as to how to deal with this problem.
Dan
Received on Friday, 18 May 2001 08:02:23 UTC